


hold me from underneath

by singsongsung



Category: Room - Emma Donoghue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 07:33:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8881492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: For a long time, they say she is (was) the sweetest girl, the nicest girl, the kindest, the smartest. Heart of gold, they say. Good head on her shoulders. Missed by her family, friends, classmates, community. They say so many things about her that she’ll never hear --And then they stop. Or: Ma, after Nick, before Jack.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chelseafrew](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelseafrew/gifts).



> Trigger warnings for rape, miscarriage, and all horrible elements of kidnapping. 
> 
> Ma’s thoughts in this fic were inspired in part by Samantha Broun’s radio documentary “A Life Sentence: Victims, Offenders, Justice, And My Mother,” which This American Life recently aired.
> 
> Title from Cobi's "Don't You Cry For Me."

Here is a secret, from a girl whose very existence is hidden away: she wasn’t that great of a person.

This isn’t to say she was _bad_ , or unlikable; she was certainly never cruel. But she was plenty of unpleasant things -- she was selfish sometimes, she was bratty, she was often bitchy to Paul, and she was every teenage girl cliche, worrying about whether she should dye her hair, blushing at the sight of Cute Jordan in her biology class, pitching fits about curfew and calories.

The television is delivered to her own personal hell-hole too late. She never sees her mother on TV, pleading for her safe return; never sees her once-stoic father cry in front of countless microphones. She misses the news reports, somber-faced anchors with crow’s feet listing the details of her disappearance. She misses the way the stories about her fade away: the photograph of a bright-eyed girl, smiling easily, stops showing up on every night’s news programming. There are updates on websites even when she stops smiling at families watching the 6 o’clock report, but after a while, they give up, too.

For a long time, they say she is (was) the sweetest girl, the nicest girl, the kindest, the smartest. _Heart of gold,_ they say. _Good head on her shoulders._ Missed by her family, friends, classmates, community. They say so many things about her that she’ll never hear --

And then they stop.

There is nothing more to say about her other than the simple fact that she is gone.

 

…

 

There are so many spaces inside of her, so many valleys of misery. Her grief mates with her self-pity and forms a kind of devastation that can only be expressed through strangled screams. Her anger renders her absolutely silent, absolutely blank. Her heartbreak, her what-ifs -- they are pains as real as cuts in skin.

Once, as he rapes her, she bursts into laughter that she cannot control. Her emotions are mixed up, signals crossed. Everything is too ludicrous, everything is _impossible_. Who is this man? What is he doing to her?

He thinks she’s mocking him, laughing at him in some way: amused by his age, his sexual prowess, his desire to dominate her, all of the above. He slaps her for that, so hard that her ears ring.

She gets him back with the toilet cover, with her knife -- or she almost does. His rage and the damage he does to her wrist are nothing compared to the way she rages against herself. She could have been free. She could have been home.

The spaces inside her grow darker and deeper.

 

…

 

Hours fade into days, into weeks, perhaps even into months.

The nausea snaps her back to reality.

 

…

 

Her pregnancy is surreal. She doesn’t know the right things to do for herself, or for her baby. She’s scared of childbirth and even more afraid of what comes after -- of what he might do to a baby, or to its mother.

At first, her hatred threatens to consume her, that blackout anger that hardens her into a shell of a girl. Her body feels invaded. She wants nothing more than to die.

But her baby grows. Her baby kicks. He comes for her much less often, and then stops, appearing only to deliver food and briefly scrutinize the hard bump of her belly. The parasite he inflicted upon her body (he’s inflicted so many things) becomes a baby that belongs to her alone, that listens to her whispers in the darkest hours of the night, that presses back against the pressure of her palms.

Slowly, so slowly, her daughter fills the empty spaces inside her.

 

…

 

It is the greatest tragedy of her life (already so tragic), the birthandloss, a single word, the single event, the birthandloss of her baby daughter.

 

…

 

The fights seeps out of her like it’s blood and she’s been drained of it. Her hands are weak, fingers limp. Her skin is dull and colourless. She chews the skin off her lips and rips at her nails until the nailbeds are exposed, raw and pink and bleeding. Her breasts ache; they leak. The emptiness once housed inside of her seems to have outgrown her body.

He comes again, her hurts her again, and she lets him again, again, again.

There is not a single thing left within her to lose.

 

....

 

She named her daughter Alice, because she imagined a little girl who might bring wonder to her otherwise monotonous, hopeless life. She dreams of Alice at night, of the girl-woman she might have grown up to be, with a bright, laughing smile on the evening news and the stupidity to get into a man’s truck because of a story about a damn dog.

She wakes with sweaty palms and a scream caught so tight in her throat that she chokes.

 

…

 

The second pregnancy dries her of tears. She weeps until her mouth is parched, her tongue sandpaper. Her eyelids swell. There are no whispers to her stomach, no glimmers of something like love. She feels like a victim, at last -- a victim of kidnapping, of rape, of this pregnancy that she fears will never turn into a person.

She has a memory, blurry at the edges, of her mother taking out childhood photo albums, spreading them across her lap. She has memories of still captures of her life, head thrown back with laughter, mouth wide in truly happy smiles, a lanky teenage arm slung around her brother, small and pressed between her parents. Her history had the vibrancy of so many colours, of so much joy. She’d thought her future would hold the same.

 

…

 

Now that she lacks the energy to dig into the floor, the motivation to scream at the high window, or the wherewithal to try and form a plan to escape, she sometimes sits on the bed and presses her fingers to the wall with her eyes closed tight. She imagines her mother, out there, somewhere, and hopes, or dreams, that her mother imagines her back. Sometimes it will slip out of her mouth so softly, that universal call of need, _ma_ , the word she addressed her mother with when she was very young, before _mom_ became the cooler, more mature word of choice.

 _Ma._ It’s a breath in the stale, dead air of the room, this room that is her whole world, but she has to believe, she has to dream, that somehow, in her heart if not in her ears, somewhere out there her mother can hear her. It’s a plea for help, an utterance that seeks protection, a warm embrace to tuck itself into. Somewhere out in the world, she has to believe, her mother is trying to figure out a way to find her. Her mother is trying to make it all better, to smoothe the raw edges of her life back into something she can bear.

Her mother will try and save her.

She has lost the will to save herself.

 

…

 

Her son is born small and sweet. He is born perfect and healthy. She holds each finger, each toe, like a sacred object.

Her son is worth the blood and the pain. Her son’s hazy, startled eyes are worth the world.

She calls him Jack, for no particular reason, and rocks him late into the night, the circle of her arms a shield against the world. _My baby, my baby_ , she whispers, touching his button of a nose.

When Jack looks at her, really _looks_ at her, focused for the very first time, he looks at her like she, too, is worth the world. He looks at her like she’s the great person that she never quite was, before.

He looks at her like she is Ma -- like she will save him.

 

…

 

fin


End file.
